Why doesn't history feel like history while we're living through it?

The French Revolution. The outbreak of World War I. The Roaring Twenties. Looking back, these moments seem obvious, dramatic, and inevitable. But for most of the people who lived through them, they felt surprisingly ordinary.

In this episode of Context with Brad Harris, historian Brad Harris explores the gap between lived history and remembered history. Why has Louis XVI's famous journal entry—"Nothing"—been misunderstood for more than two centuries? Why did most Americans experience the Roaring Twenties very differently from the version we remember today? And why do even civilization-changing events quickly become part of everyday life?

Drawing on the work of historian Fernand Braudel, eyewitness accounts from 1914, and examples ranging from the French Revolution to artificial intelligence, this episode argues that history is shaped by two powerful forces: hindsight compresses the past into memorable stories, while human beings rapidly normalize even the most extraordinary changes.

If you've ever wondered how future generations will remember the 2020s, or whether we're overlooking the real turning points of our own era, this episode is for you.

Topics: French Revolution, Louis XVI, Fernand Braudel, Annales School, World War I, Roaring Twenties, history, historical memory, hindsight, artificial intelligence, civilization, culture, philosophy of history.

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